Mushkin Launches Scorpion Delux PCI-E SSD

Mushkin, a company primarily known in the US for its RAM modules, announced a new PCI Express-based SSD this week called the Scorpion Deluxe. The new solid state drive is an update to the original Scorpion drive, and while it is not boot-able (edit from Allyn - it is bootable), it makes for an extremely speedy cache for large databases at decent prices (for a PCI-E SSD, anyway).

The Mushkin Scorpion Deluxe is driven by four SandForce SF-2281 processors and uses a PCI-E 2.0 x8 electrical interface to offer up gobs of bandwidth. The drive comes in several capacities, including 240GB, 480GB, 960GB, and 1,920GB. It is rated at 2,150 MB/s reads and over 1900 MB/s writes (exact rated speed depends on capacity, up to 2000 MB/s on the 2TB model). Also, the drive is specc’d to deliver a bit over 100,000 4K read and write IOPS. There is a 1 million hour MTBF rating and a 3 year warranty with the SSD.

Mushkin is aiming the drive more-so at the enterprise market for use in servers to cache large databases or in workstations working with large files in content creation, modeling, or simulations.

The Scorpion Deluxe drive is available now in the US, and will be up for purchase worldwide on September 16th. Pricing is not too bad, especially at the higher capacity points where the $/GB starts to look good.

PCI-E SSD Capacity

Pricing (US)

$/GB

240GB

$559.99

$2.33/GB

480GB

$794.42

$1.66/GB

960GB

$1276.50

$1.33/GB

1920GB

$2052.15

$1.07/GB

Only $1.07 per GB on the 2TB model? If only I had a corporate expense account! (heh)